Not Just a Game
Gaming is a leisure activity for most people, for some an obsession, but what many don’t realize is that gaming is the way we process and learn within our environment. From the time we are babies we are playing games. Children play “house”, and “doctor”, and “war”, and they do this all over the world, without any rules but the ones they see in their day to day lives.
Gaming is a learning tool, and the games we play in our adult lives should also be teaching us something. What do we learn from a huge game like WoW or Guild Wars? We learn cooperation, social interaction, tolerance of other races… we learn that we can all be heroes. We also learn economics when we buy and sell things, trying to optimize our backpack space. We learn physics when we deal with our character’s movement, and mathematics when we count up mana costs, degeneration, regeneration, spell effects, etc. We learn logic when we string skills together to get that awesome effect… and the list goes on.
We are practicing social interactions with people around the world. The world is getting smaller and smaller, and it’s due to online gaming as much as it is due to online business. When you make friends at home, do you make friends with business partners, or with people you have fun with? The world has always been about “who” you know rather than “what” you know. Bill Gates plays WoW. Maybe you’ve seen him outside a town and never realized it.
In the future we must focus on what our games bring to the world. The best games leave us with a sense of having come away from them better than when we started them. That is our goal as designers.